Welcome back to the tiny family room One Room Challenge makeover, also known as holy moly there are only two weeks left in this challenge! If you are new here, you can find week 1, week 2 and week 3 just below this post or through those lovely little links.

Let’s get right down to it. This week, I did not get anywhere on my plan for the family room. The painters came to paint the rest of the house, and lucky for me, painted my little family room as well. It is REALLY hard to pick the right white paint and boy did I get lucky. This paint (Benjamin Moore's Chantilly Lace) made a huge difference in the feel of every room in the house.

This back wall used to be the back of the house, and we think part of this room was once a back porch. Part of this section was already painted but I had the painters leave the part that wasn't. I loved the color of the wood and how it warms up the wall.

But back to our little family room. I spent a lot of time waffling. I returned two of the three rugs that I had ordered during week 3.

I decided to paint the floors and picked out a color (do you see how messed up those floors. are? And they are not real wood, so there's no point in refinishing them.) I went to IKEA and came out with nothing but a cereal container.

Coat of paint and new handles? This could make a great TV stand. Except that it doesn't fit.

I searched Craig’s List for furniture. I wandered through several local antique and thrift shops for furniture. I bought no furniture. Instead, I bought a fourth rug at Home Goods and decided not to paint the floors the color that I had previously picked out.

Let's be honest. This rug might end up in my office if I ever get to that.

To be fair to myself, I may not have mentioned this, but our whole house is a construction zone right now. I’m not actually sitting around on my duff. Maybe there is a bit of fake work going on here. When I signed myself on to this challenge, I should have selected our bathroom as my room of choice, but I thought there was no way that we would even get to the bathroom before this challenge ended. Plus, completion of the bathroom was dependent on other people’s schedules. I was shocked and amazed when the day after I posted week one of the challenge, I discovered that my bathroom had already been gutted and our contractor needed decisions on bathroom fixtures, finishes, and contents as soon as possible. Nothing like planning a bathroom in two days.

This is why a six week challenge is such a good idea. Without the deadline, artificial or real, you waffle. And you talk yourself into sitting on the floor and not really needing to finish the room. Every time you go into the unfinished room, you cringe. You begin to avoid the room. Except in this situation, we have nowhere else to sit. Remember how I said in week two that we moved to Houston with nothing? Once we move into our house, it will be empty except for our mattresses, a temporary table with folding chairs, and this room. I think I had better finish the room.

Here is the list of things that need to be done over the next two weeks:

1.Floors need to be prepped and painted. Oh, and see that lovely missing molding? That needs to be repaired.

2.Blinds need to be found for four windows and they need to be cheap. We get good sun in this room, and I’m really not a curtain person, but I think some sort of window covering will prove necessary for movie night. Also this room looks right at the garage, which is not scheduled to be painted until phase 2 of our home update. However, we don’t know how long this room will remain functioning as our family room (we are hoping at some point to finish the attic as a bonus space, which will require use of this space for the staircase), so I don’t want to invest a lot into good blinds.

3.I need to find some furniture. Specifically, we need:

a.a TV stand (preferably with storage),

b.a wall mounted table or slim desk or coffee table that the kids can use for legos, arts and crafts, etc.,

c.stools for the desk/table (unless we go with a coffee table),

d.a shelf for the corner nook plus baskets for toys.

These are the high priority items. I’d also like to have the room feel and look finished. This means that I need to find some fun artwork, colorful pillows, a throw or two, and a pendant lamp. I’ve got to stop typing and get looking. I sure hope the other ORC participants are doing better than I am with this challenge. Check them all out here. (And P.S. to Linda? As much as I have left to do and as much as I'm stressed out about doing it, this is really a fun challenge. Thanks for creating this!)

I’ll be hiding out in this secret garden today if anyone needs me... #wishthiswasmyyard

School picture day. And it finally feels like fall in #houston

Today is #dayofthegirl , a day created by the UN to celebrate the strength of girls and acknowledge the barriers girls face in all over the world. Yesterday in our #girlscout meeting, we made pins to wear today and we worked thru the @wagggs_world curriculum around International Day of the Girl and gender equality. I can best sum up the girls’ discussion by quoting one of the girls: “Mind blown.” (Imagine this with full 8yo drama quotient and hand motions. It was rich.) 👧🏾👧🏼👧🏽👧🏿👧🏻 I wrote a big, long caption about the importance of this day in a global context but the fact of the matter is that my 8yo daughter, who proudly wore a pin last night to dinner (swipe left), won’t wear her pin to school today because she thinks the boys will make fun of her. “They expect me to like certain things and act a certain way, Mom.” Full stop. 👧🏽👧🏻👧🏾👧🏿👧🏼 I’m angry. And I’m incredibly sad. And I’m sharing that here because real life. 👧🏻👧🏽👧🏿👧🏼👧🏾 I get that kids will be kids and the boys in question certainly don’t have an intent to exclude girls simply because they are girls. Or if they do have that intent it’s because both genders think the other stinks at this age. I get that my daughter’s insecurities are her own, her assumptions about what may happen are her own, and I’m sure I’ve contributed to both by being a loud mouth feminist. But y’all. Our kids - our daughters and our sons - deserve better than this. They deserve better than to continue to live within the confines of worn out stereotypes of gender roles. I’m open to ideas. How are we going to change this? #bethechange

I don’t typically celebrate “wins”. To be clear, it’s not that I object to public acknowledgment of success, just that it’s more my nature to move on to the next thing once (if ever) something is complete. It’s also possible that my idea of a win has always been substantially larger than getting dinner on the table. Hence the parenthetical in the previous sentence. 🌮🥟🥞 Today, however, I want to acknowledge some wins and I want to do so publicly so that those of you reading this who are like me, who have what others call “high expectations” (virgos and type As anyone?), and who beat yourselves up over the incomplete items on the list instead of noticing the things that you actually did (and that probably weren’t even on the list to begin with) - YES ! I'm talking to you! You might possibly recognize yourself. (Also that was certainly a run-on sentence. Let’s move on.) 🏅🏆🎖 Today, I said yes to yoga with a fellow mom who I don’t know well, which was uncomfortable on more than one front. And it turned out to be amazing. Health and well-being win. 🧘🏻‍♀️🧘🏻‍♀️🧘🏻‍♀️ Today, I intended to join in with One Room Challenge for the 5th time. I sat down and wrote a blog post about why I was participating only to find in the writing that I no longer felt the need to participate. So I didn’t. And on top of that, I didn’t feel that the time writing was time wasted. Down with busy for the sake of busy win. 🏡🏡🏡 Today, my son lost his campaign for representative of his third grade classroom. He came home in tears. But we talked, and he went from never trying anything new again to never trying things with voting to maybe trying things with voting in a couple of years. He ended the day in smiles. I’m not going to lie. There may have been an ice cream sandwich involved. Parenting win. ✅✅✅ Today, I got real dinner on the table, with vegetables and everything, for the third day in a row, despite soccer and music lessons and whatever else. And my kids ate it. And we talked while we ate dinner. Normal, right? I’m going with a win. 🥗🍝🍪 So there it is. The little things have big impact. Tell me, if you’ve made it this far, what was your win today? #ryhsyinnercircle

Thirteen years married to this guy today. Pretty damn lucky. #adventureisoutthere